


Old Friend

by finefeatheredfriend



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Reader is John Marston, Roleplaying Character, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:27:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22642576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finefeatheredfriend/pseuds/finefeatheredfriend
Summary: You need a break from tending your ranch, Beecher's Hope, and decide to visit the Valentine stockyards you and Arthur took those stolen sheep to so long ago. You are surprised to find an old friend there - Arthur's horse, and you decide you simply cannot leave him behind.[              “I was thinkin’ about it, I’d like to buy that nag from you.”“That horse?” he asked you, and you knew you’d messed up. He had seen it, that glimpse of hope in your eyes, that fear of losing something important. “Well, I reckon that horse is worth about fifty dollars now the auction’s over.” You clenched your fists so tightly a couple of your knuckles popped.“Fifty?” you demanded with a hard scoff. “It ain’t worth more than five at the most,” you lied, your heart pounding in your chest. This horse was worth anything, everything, just to rest your hand where Arthur’s had patted its neck, just to sit where he had ridden, to feel him close again on this sway-backed, broken animal.]
Relationships: Abigail Roberts Marston/John Marston, Abigail Roberts Marston/Reader, John Marston & Arthur Morgan
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	Old Friend

You weren’t really sure why you had ridden up here again. Maybe it was the stress of dealing with the farm, maybe it was the fact that Abigail was in a mood and was being even less patient with you than she normally was, but regardless, you needed to stretch your legs, needed to revisit the old places, dangerous though that could be. You trotted up to the Valentine sales lot, your heart clenching in your chest at the memory of a little flock of sheep and Arthur teasing you mercilessly about them. You remembered him giving you crap, as he always did, and remembered that the subject that time had been your lack of experience on a ranch. Well. So much for that. You leaned over the fence, shoving your hat more solidly on your brow, scratching absently at the smooth lines of scar that caused a stutter in your facial hair.

You remembered that too, the terror of nearly being eaten alive by wolves. The surprise at seeing that Arthur had come for you, after all the bad blood between the two of you at the time. You swallowed hard, pushing your emotions away and cramming them down your gullet where you couldn’t feel them so acutely. You were a grown man now, trying to make a life for himself. No use crying over spilled milk.

Ranchers herded their little groups of sheep and goats and cattle up and the auctioneer rattled off numbers as the audience raised paddles to bid. You’d been offered one, took it so you could blend in, but you had no intention of buying anything today. Hell, you barely had the money to make the mortgage payment this month, let alone buy more livestock you could hardly keep fed. Maybe you ought to look Sadie up again, just one more time…but that’s what you always told yourself: “just one more time.” Starting to sound like Dutch, you thought bitterly.

You felt sweat trickling down your neck and scratched at it, lifting your long, stringy hair out of your collar. The day was getting on and you were just about to leave when they began to lead horses in. Ordinarily you would pay it no mind, but that horse… _that_ horse was familiar. Tennessee Walker. A male horse with legs that were just slightly too short for its frame. White with reddish-brown patches over its body, a standard brown paint. Your breath caught in your throat. A scar from an old bullet wound in its front right shoulder. You put your boot up on the wooden fence and felt yourself flush when you realized that tears were gathering in your eyes. You coughed and pretended to sneeze, pulling a handkerchief out of your pocket to wipe your eyes and nose. Wouldn’t do no good getting emotional over a damn nag, you told yourself.

The horse was grizzled and very old. He was swaybacked, his joints knobbly and stiff. He moved slowly around the sale yard, hooves clopping softly in the dirt. Turning toward you, it whickered softly, perhaps in recognition, but someone waved a handkerchief and he spooked, backing up and half-stumbling, half-limping back across the yard. In the glimpse you had caught, you saw that his eyes were rheumy, shot through with blue-white cataracts. The horse you remembered was a stallion, but he had been gelded, and it showed in his chest and his belly. He had lost muscle tone and gained weight, only to lose it to old age, his hip bones jutting outwards abruptly, his ribs showing through his shaggy, dirty coat. He looked as though he hadn’t seen a brush in years. You didn’t know how he got here, didn’t know who had found him, but by the time you could collect yourself, by the time you could swallow the massive, hard lump in your throat, he had been sold to someone for a dollar-fifty for meat. No one else had bid on the ancient animal.

Heart in your throat, you approached the gentleman who had paid for the horse, forcing yourself not to reach for your side arm when he slapped the animal hard on the rear to force it out of its stall and into a temporary holding pen.

“I was thinkin’ about it, I’d like to buy that nag from you. Just what my son needs, somethin’ slow and stupid. An old horse he won’t get too attached to, but he can learn to ride on,” you mused aloud. The man chuckled.

“That horse?” he asked you, and you knew you’d messed up. He had seen it, that glimpse of hope in your eyes, that fear of losing something important. “Well, I reckon that horse is worth about fifty dollars now the auction’s over,” the man informed you with a dirty twist to his mouth. You clenched your fists so tightly a couple of your knuckles popped.

“Fifty?!” you demanded with a hard scoff. “It ain’t worth more than five at the most,” you lied, your heart pounding in your chest. This horse was worth anything, everything, just to rest your hand where Arthur’s had patted its neck, just to sit where he had ridden, to feel him close again on this sway-backed, broken animal. The man surveyed you.

“Twenty.”

“Seven,” you countered, knowing you’d have to starve yourself for the next week just to make ends meet.

“Ten, and that’s final,” the man said, and you could tell from the clench to his jaw he was serious. You held out a hand you had to force not to tremble.

“Sold.”

“Alright then. I’ll have them draw up a bill of sale.”

Twenty minutes later and ten dollars poorer, you tied the horse’s rope to your saddle horn, pulling yourself up onto your own mount. You couldn’t remember what the old paint had been named, but he answered well enough when you told him,

“Come on, boah,” thickening your accent into a vague rendition of Arthur’s old twang in a way that almost physically hurt you. It was painful, pouring his own words out of your tightened throat, feeling the word trickle over your tongue like an injury made into sound. The horse knickered, ears flicking forward and back, its eyes blinking slowly as if trying to remember an old friend. You barely made it out of Valentine and into the open fields just south of it before you had to get off your horse, your eyes too full of tears to see the road.

This was not the last horse Arthur had ridden. You weren’t really sure why he had ridden Buell to that last desperate confrontation with Micah and the Pinkertons, but you guessed that Arthur had known what was coming when he had stabled his own horse, this paint, and climbed on Buell instead. You thought perhaps he had known that Buell was getting up in years, that the horse just hadn’t been quite right since his original owner Hamish had died. You thought maybe this old paint was one more soul Arthur had tried to save from its fate.

You approached it slowly, pulling out Arthur’s journal with reverence, carefully turning the pages with your tobacco and gun-powder stained fingers. You flipped to the page depicting this horse. The sketch was a good likeness, marking the paint blotches on the horse’s coat quite accurately. The horse’s name had been smeared accidentally by Arthur’s thumb, making it illegible, a snarl of graphite on rough yellowing paper. Saddened, you touched the thumbprint with your own finger, disappointed that you wouldn’t be able to call the horse by its real name. You put the journal away and patted its neck.

“You’re a good boy,” you assured it, voice catching in your throat. You didn’t talk about Arthur much, but you thought about him a lot. You placed your palm on the old gelding’s neck, your fingers spread wide to encompass the place you knew Arthur had put his hand a hundred times before and you broke, a sob working its way up through your body. Tears trickled freely down your face and you wept, wrapping your arms around the horse’s neck, too distracted with your grief to be surprised that the horse tolerated the behavior. It whickered softly, bending its head around so that it was nearly embracing you with his neck, his upper lip snuffling at your side gently. You tangled fingers in his mane, resting your cheek against the stiff fur, your tears soaking into the hair there, loosening old dirt.

You cried until you could cry no more, your eyes stuffy, swollen and red. You felt a damn fool, crying over an old horse, but that wasn’t really why you were crying, and you thought perhaps both of you knew it. Pulling your brush from your saddlebags, you diligently loosened the dirt and sweat from the horse’s coat, brushing until his hair was as shiny as it ever would be in his old age. He still looked dingy and decrepit, but at least he was clean. You fed him some oats, feeding your own horse too and you built up a fire, sitting at it absently, wondering what on earth you were going to do with it now. Should you turn it loose? Let it go free?

No, Arthur would want to make sure it was taken care of until its time came. He would want it to have a better ending than him.

You went hungry that night, having spent the money you’d set aside for dinner and then some on this horse. Abigail was sure to tan your hide, but you hoped she’d understand. You thought perhaps she’d been more understanding than you’d ever given her credit for, standing by you when you’d acted such a goddamn fool, leaving her and Jack for months and then being a bastard when you’d returned. She had stuck by you, and that meant something. It took you the better part of two weeks to get the horse back to Beecher’s Hope, having to stop to give it plenty of breaks, to let it rest and eat and get water. It put on a little weight since you fed it oats twice a day, and you lost some, your belly grumbling loudly as you forced yourself to eat the can of salted offal that had been sitting in your saddle bag for nearly six months.

Riding through the gates of your ranch, you saw Abigail out feeding the chickens and felt your chest warm, despite the fact that you knew you were probably about to get an ass-chewing. She turned and you held up a hand and waved to her awkwardly, ever the fool whenever you were around her.

“Well, it took you long enough to get back here,” she commented, her eyes flicking to the horse you were leading behind your own. She opened her mouth to speak again, stopped, and dropped the sack of corn she’d been dispersing. The chickens squawked and chattered, gathering in a frenzy around her feet to get at the corn. Absently, she stepped over them, picking up her skirts and shoving a few out of the way so that she could approach. “John Marston,” she murmured, her voice thick. She looked up at you, her eyes glittering with tears. “Where on earth did you find him?”

“Valentine stockyards,” you told her, your hoarse voice thick with emotion again. Abigail patted the old gelding gently, her hand resting on its nose.

“Let’s put him in the barn,” she said softly. “He looks tired.” You climbed down off your horse.

“Yeah. He’s been through a lot.” Abigail walked with you, taking your hand as you held the rope attached to the old gelding’s harness and leading him into the stable. Jack was in the corner reading a book, and he leapt up guiltily.

“I finished mucking the barn already and I was just about to…” his voice trailed off and he frowned, brows pulling together in an expression of consternation. “Hey…I know that horse.”

“It was your…” you cleared your throat, “It was your Uncle Arthur’s. Found him down at the Valentine stockyards. Couldn’t bring myself to leave him there.” Jack stepped forward, patting the horse gently.

“I’ve ridden this horse,” Jack told you in a quiet voice. “It was a long time ago…Uncle Arthur took me fishing. Pulled me up onto his horse and let me hold the reins on the way to the river.”

“Yep. He’s a good horse. But he’s old. Can’t be riding him or working him hard,” you warned your son, but Jack didn’t respond, just kept petting the horse’s neck. “Jack?”

“Yeah?” His gaze flickered to yours.

“If you’ll take care of him, he’s yours. You can use him to help you with your chores, just make sure you don’t put too much weight on him, you understand?”

“Sure, Pa, sure. Easy boy,” he told the ancient gelding. “Uncle Arthur used to feed you peppermints. You still like peppermints?” Jack extracted one from his pocket. Abigail had bought it for him on her last trip into town, a rare, expensive treat. He gave it freely to the old horse and you had to dig your nails into your palms within your clenched fists to keep from tearing up again with pride this time.

“You be sure to keep his stall clean, you hear me?” With that, you exited the barn, making your way to the house where you gratefully wolfed down a bowl of stew Abigail had made.

The old horse never did have his name again. You all just called him “Boy,” with that country twang of Arthur’s that made it sound more like “Boah.” Boy was ornery, and stubborn, but he was a good horse, still willing to help cart things around in his old age. He even let Jack sit on his back and you had to force yourself not to feel envy that your son could sit where Arthur once had. You were too big and too heavy for the old horse to deal with anymore, but though you couldn’t ride him, that didn’t stop you from sneaking out to the barn late at night, reading Arthur’s journal for the thirtieth time by the light of your lantern, Boy resting his head heavily on your shoulder. It didn’t stop you from scrubbing him with your curry comb at least once a week, and it definitely didn’t stop you from talking to him as though he were Arthur whenever you were missing him on particularly bad days.

Boy was the first soul you told you were proposing to Abigail, leaning on his stable in the barn, your voice shaking with nerves as you told him your plan to take her into town and show her a nice time before you proposed with Arthur’s old ring. Seemed like Arthur had done his best to make sure you had everything you needed, even an ear to listen to your rambling, you thought as you scratched Boy between the ears affectionately.

You returned home from dealing with Micah carrying a heavy bag of money, the Blackwater treasure, surrendered by Dutch. The money didn’t really make you feel much better, but telling old Boy about it did.

“You look tired, Boy,” you told him as you sat next to him in his stall. He was laying down, blinking slowly, his ears flicking occasionally to keep the flies away. You patted him and scratched under his jaw, but he didn’t move his head, just let out a deep sigh. “I finally got him, Boy. I finally killed that bastard Micah. I finally avenged Arthur,” you told him. The horse whinnied softly, blowing out a massive breath. “So you can rest now, Boy,” you choked out, knowing what was coming. You had seen it in his eyes. The exhaustion. He hadn’t been long for the world when you saw him in that dusty sale yard, but you had done your best to give him the kind of life Arthur would have if he were still alive. “Can you tell him for me, Boy? Can you tell him I finished it?” Your voice broke and you let yourself cry again, knowing the rest of your family was fast asleep in the barn after you had celebrated killing Micah and finding the Blackwater money. Boy turned his head, resting his chin on your leg heavily, his eyes half-closed. “It’s alright, Boy. You go. You let Arthur know, I did my best to make sure his sacrifice wasn’t for nothing.”

Boy’s head tilted to the side and he let out one final, tired breath, his neck cradled around you, and whether it was real or imagined, you heard Arthur’s voice.

“Come on, boah. Let’s go.”


End file.
